How Long Does It Take A Website To Rank On Google?

This blog is intended for somebody who has a new website or has never done “SEO” before. So you want to know how long SEO takes? Read on…

Where do we begin? As internet marketers we get asked this all the time. I will provide you an answer, but you’ll have to promise to not skip to the end!

Let’s assume you are talking about Search Engine Optimization a.k.a. SEO. Paid search will let you get to page one quickly, but it will cost you each time someone clicks on your link.

Back to SEO, where the first page doesn’t come in a day. Most people when they ask this question are thinking of one thing: a “fat head” keyword. Something like, let’s say “dentist.”

They think “if I only ranked for the word dentist, I would get so much business!” This person might even have used to Google Keyword Planner to get estimated search volume, done the math and saw a pot of gold at the end of the search rainbow.

Ranking for “dentist” might get you a lot of new business, but there are a few things to consider.

Is it worth the time and effort to focus on only one keyword?

Is it realistic, if at all even possible?

If Google shows different results to different people, will it really pay off as much as I think it will?

How qualified will those leads be?

Would spending some of your money on a conversion-friendly page be better than investing it all in SEO?

Do the majority of people still search that way?

What is going to make YOU any more of a dentist than any other dentist out there? I.e. how are you going to be more RELEVANT for that search?

For those of you not familiar with “Fat Head” “Chunky Middle” and “Long Tail” this diagram from the leading SEO site Moz illustrates the idea quite well:

”Dentist” would be a fat head term for our purposes. Below I’ve classified a few in each of the categories:

Longtail: “what dental procedures are covered by OHIP?” “does it hurt to have a root canal?” “are dental x-rays damaging?”

If you focus on creating a website that satisfies a good portion of the chunky middle and even a small slice of the long-tail, you’ll inevitably end up satisfying Google for the fat head keywords like dentist, dentist office, and dental clinic (for some of the searchers, remember that everyone’s search results are different).

If you’re still set on fat head keywords, be prepared to pay! …in a number of ways.

If we’re talking PPC, you may pay $8-9 per click (current estimated bid in Toronto Canada).

If you’re talking SEO, you could end up paying a very big price: having your site never show in Google search results again!

If an SEO company says they can get you to the number one position in a number of weeks they

a) have a black hat link network that they’ll gladly weave you into for a hefty fee

b) are wizards.

Choosing “A” is very risky, because although your site may get some traffic, the next Google algorithm update is bound to knock you off the first page. Do you really want to go through hiring extra staff when business is good, then have to lay them off because you’re no longer ranking? If you choose this path, and you’re de-indexed from Google, your only hope is to build a new site and re-name your business while you’re at it.

So really, how long does it take to make it to the first page of Google?

If you’re doing it with sustainability in mind, then it will probably take 3-6 months depending on how much you invest, and how savvy your competition is.

You need a long-term effort that takes a holistic approach and not simply SEO and building links. You need to have content to go after those chunky middle and long-tail terms (blogs are especially great for long-tails). You’ll also benefit from social media in order to get that content out there. Ideally, also you’re willing to put a little bit of budget into Facebook promoted posts to expand your reach.

As you begin to work with a reputable SEO agency (in Toronto like us), your site’s authority will increase. You can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to find out your Domain Authority (similar to Google pagerank, but a much more accurate and more frequently updated indicator of site quality). As your site ages it will earn Google’s trust and will begin to rank for a broader range of keywords. On average, we expect to see first page organic rankings at the 3-6 month mark (this can take less, or more time depending on your industry). After 3-6 months our goal is to rank on the first page for a subset of the initial keyword list. We will track/report on a wide-range of keywords so you can chart your progress over time. An SEO agency shouldn’t limit you to a tight list of keywords to focus on, remember if that were the case you’d be missing out on a lot of “chunky middle” traffic.

I hope I’ve answered this question for most of you. Ask these questions to your SEO company:

What is the competition like in my sector?

What level of service would you recommend to be competitive?

How will you help me track results?

That’s it, that’s “how to be #1 in Google!”

-Steve

P.S. As the content marketing manager at TechWyse I’d be remiss not to mention this: anybody who tells you SEO can be done without content, is a) either lying and doesn’t know they’re talking about b) involved in a black hat link scheme and will likely put your site in danger of being de-indexed by a search algorithm update.

P.P.S. There once was a day where you could build all your links to one fat head keyword, e.g. dentistwebsite.com with the anchor “dentist.” There was a time this worked, and would help you rank for dentist. Today, doing this will have the exact opposite effect and penalize your site. It’s very rare to consistently rank #1 for a keyword — Google’s algorithm changes far too much to allow for this.

Please feel free to connect with me on social media @strategyinventr or leave a comment below!

EMD or having a keyword in the domain could give you a slight edge, but it may seem kind of spammy to some users. A natural name may be better for brand recognition and people being able to remember your site. Each choice has trade-offs.

For a newbie like myself, I needed to read such an article to help me re-think my SEO strategies. I definitely won’t be going the black hat route. I’ve worked too hard to get into any kind of trouble. I was wondering if it takes much longer if keywords aren’t targeted enough. Will there be other strategies that you might suggest? This

This article for me is gold. I’ve been looking around the web for help on my business but never read an entire post however, coming across this article, i actually read the entire post. and it will bring a whole lot of change to my business.

Hello there,
My website’s Domain Authority is 28, I am focusing on Water Flosser keyword from last 6 months but the keyword is stuck at 3rd page. What can I do now?
Give me suggestion @Steve.
Thanks in advance.

Build one ultimate page that is targeted to an active niche that is related to your industry. Make sure the content is aimed at the blogs who have the ability to link to you. Make sure they have written about your topic. Once you’re done with you piece, you’ll want to outreach to them. I really like this blog and have used this technique with success: http://backlinko.com/seo-campaign

Hi there.
Very good and a helpful post. I want to know that can an EMD site be ranked nowadays in Google. How much time would it take to get on first page for a specific keyword with medium comp and what does it require.

As a SEO Analyst at Lyseis Marketing Company, I like what you said above all about PR and I completely agree with you —– “To make your website to the first page of Google will probably take 3-6 months. It’s all depending on how much you invest on it and how hard the competition is”.

This blog is very informative for beginners to understand the concept of SEO.

I love the meme. Anyway, it is really hard to accept the demands of clients of ranking #1 and getting traffic as soon as possible. Ranking in Google SERPs is a bit hard specially now that Google is continuously updating their algorithm. The best thing to do is to follow his guidelines. Invest time in targeting right keywords through Personas and writing a quality content. A little white hat link building will help. Also, tools are important because there are also some keywords that are ranking without you knowing it. Those keywords might easily be ranked on top and give you traffic, too.

Hi Steve,
I must say that you have gone through all those things in which each and every Internet marketer goes. Even i face the same when a client asks me to bring his site up in 15 days.
moreover, a very good and enjoyable post to read thanks a lot.

Hello Steve! I am still learning and researching about blogging lifestyle… while on research I’ve little by little knowledge about indexing and ranking. I built a website for a blog which at first I did not know all about these.

Thanks for a nice article. It is impressive, but my blog is already almost 2 years and I did not know that it can take 3-6 months to get rank in google, but mine I do not know why I it did rank in google. Maybe there many problems when it comes to ranking. I wish I could correct them all.

SEO and it’s effects are always hard to measure. Most people tend to use the “shotgun” approach of simply throwing content in their target niche at their sites. The implicit lesson that I took from this post is the importance of keyword research for all the content on a site. Writing content with specific keywords in mind and organically plugging the target keywords will definitely help expedite the process.

You are so right, SEO can’t be done without content and the true key to rank a website is by consistently publishing (quality) content on your website. 3 to 6 months seen like a long time but once organic traffic starts getting to your site you can be sure it’s worth the time and work you’ve put on it.

I used to try to rank for fat head keywords but realized the same thing you are saying: it’s better to go after the chunky middle and long tail keywords and just write good content and after some time Google will pick that content up and start displaying it on the first page, even for fat head keywords.

I agree with you Steve, people think they can get ranked on google in a matter of days. I remember one of my blog started to get traffic from google and yahoo after a week. The amount wasn’t big but I was getting results. It was a low competition long tail keyword.

I see people coming up with services like rank to page 1 in a week. They use churn and burn technique which only lasts till next google update.

I am starting a blog and concentrate on what you call the Long tail keywords. It’s 3-4 days old now. I noticed some traffics from Google but I can’t search for it myself, which is weird even if I write the domain name on the search box.
I think being too concerned on SEO is not the best idea, instead it’s better to focus on quality of your content and engage your audience. I am just starting out, still have a lot to learn. Thanks for the information!

I have only one word to say, WoW. I read the article what a awesome article, improving my website google ranking thank you for sharing. I have a lot of work you will find a lovely support.This post is very inspiring me. I always take your advices very seriously, keep posted.

Thank you so much for your post. Very helpful.
I need help, my husband and I developed my website. I then learned abortion SEO’s. Do you offer any seminars or counseling advice on the proper way to input the Seo. New business and I want to look legit. Sorry to bother you but you have great knowledge on this topic.

I am thinking of having a blog, but since I’m an Accounting student, technical terms such as SEO are a different kind of language for me. There are a lot of terms I have to get familiar with before I could make my own blog.

This post was really helpful, my future blog is now like a dark cloud that’s slowly having light. Reading more of your post for ideas. Thanks!

I’m also starting to fully discover SEO and its impact on my blog. Before, I didn’t put much thought on it, but now I see its potential. I will definitely strive to improve my content and SEO to gain more organic traffic. I’m a newbie blogger and I hope that what I’ve learned here will definitely help in improving traffic on my video game blog. Thanks.

Great read, and I’ve found all your points true. I sell hair bows and list them all differently just to see what title techniques work. The middle and long ground are definetly the best! SEO does not fall into the less is more category.

Nice post, Steve. Solid way to tie some research together and lay it all out in a digestible format. We have very similar concepts. In fact, I recently wrote an article on this from a different vantage. I hit on similar topics, but focus more on measuring the difficulty involved. Would love to hear thoughts from a likeminded SEO.

It is a slow process it takes a several days. Keep posting a relevent content on site, make sure content should be relevent to your site. Try to avoid keyword stuffing. It will vary depending how well your site optimized and competitive the market is.

I appreciate your article. I was wondering why my site was not showing up in my google search for the primary key words associated with my profession at my location. On the other hand, many others who are not licensed in my profession or who have partial licenses are on the first page. I wonder if the “Google god” will ever be able to figure that one out? I was told by my the web site developer and SEO people that it would take about 6 weeks but that apparently does not hold for locations that are heavily saturated with pros of one sort or another. In my case, it has been 11 weeks and the site is not showing up in 14 pages. Anyway, thank you for the primary message: be patient and work on the site. If I maintain an attitude of care for my community with a wish to be helpful and informative and de-focus from a competitive and acquisitional state of mind; perhaps all will work out in the end.

Sir, my website domain authority is ‘1’. please tell me the ways to increase it.
and i am doing seo for my website from one month on words. But the page rank is ‘0’. please tell me the ways to increase it.

hi Geeta, you should need to get some good and relevant back-links which points towards your domain name to improve your DA… you have also mentioned that you are doing it from past one months… keep it up sometimes it takes time to update the DA.
and also Page rank 0 is not bad… i have also seen some people who has NA (not applicable) to get 0 in 1-2 month..
all the best hope i have answered your questions …

The first thing that caught my attention towards the post was that funny pic in the beginning.
The graph represented the whole picture clearly in a very simple manner and your explanation for that made it more simpler even to understand.

Excellent post! I have a forum that I’ve been building for roughly 7 months now and have seen great advancement in google search rank. I have seen no change in google pagerank. I’m wondering is it something I’m doing wrong or does it just take a long time for some websites to rank in this manor.

Hi. These are great tips. My website is brand new, only a month old, but I will definitely be putting these suggestions into action. In fact I have already done some of them. I am very new to the world of running a website and know very little about SEO but I am actively learning. As yet my site has not been ranked, but I’ve been posting a blog post and/or a new article every few days at least and I’ve had some friends pay the site a visit. Thanks for the advice!
catmario online

Great post, and I love the animated GIF. I’ve had someone just recently inform me that they needed first page results for a new site that hasn’t had the domain purchased in less than a week (literally the weekend). Anywho, great read with some solid information behind it and info to move forward!

Hi Sir,
I listen that after search in google if i will click on my website again and again from different IP’s then my website can come to first page of Google Search. Is this right information or wrong ?

I have the opposite problem. I have been writing a gift blog since March 2009 and until Google changed its algorithms I regularly got to the top of page one for quite a few of my long tail phrase blog titles. What happened?

Yes it most definitely takes time and a strategy. We live in an instant gratification society, so many people get discouraged when their stuff doesn’t show up quickly. It’s also difficult to get it into their heads that they have to be consistent, keep turning out content, and also offer real content and stuff that helps people rather than purely marketing hype or whatever they are selling (if they are selling something).

I just created a new site, and this is my first time doing SEO on my site. I am really impatient that why is my site still not showing on Google. After I read this article it made me realize that I need to more patient and keep what I am doing (Creating Articles) on my site.

I have a question, is it better that I add more articles on my site rather than posting to any article distribution? Thanks!

I think that a lot of SEO and content marketing experts are starting to see that the grass is greener on the other side beyond Google.

While I do agree that ranking for long tail keywords is a great strategy, so is diversifying where your traffic is coming from in the first place.

The end game for Google is to make sure the best user-experience sites get to the top of the rankings, so while doing some SEO tricks is helpful, the best advice is simply to make the best content and user experience for your visitors so that your content can be proliferated across the web and earn your dividends in the process.

Thank you for the thorough and informative article! As an addition, I would like to introduce you to a free tool, called HooshRank, that can help SEO companies answer some of the questions you mentioned in the article in no time.

HooshRank considers both the organic and paid results and instead of searching for your position with your chosen keywords, the HooshRank finds your market position with a set of 20 generic keywords (on average), measuring your performance across the industry. It’s based on your unique Visibility Score across market leading keywords.

I sincerely believe it’s the fastest way to discover your visibility and market position in a given industry.

Great article Steve. I took your advice and didn’t skip to the end. I agree that aiming for up to six months to start seeing noticeable improvement is reasonable, but I also feel that SEO should not be viewed as a race but rather as a marathon. I think consistency is the most important thing to stay relevant and the best part of your article I think, is that you identified to people that they need to concentrate on proving content to support the chunky middle and long-tail terms that will get the ball rolling, and continue to work your way up to fat head terms over time.

My blog has just completed 3 months and it has started getting some organic traffic from Google. It needs time and effort to rank well on Google. Right now, my blog is ranking on 2nd and 3rd page of Google for most of my short keywords. While my blog is ranking on first page for some of my long tail keywords.

Changes in Google algorithms have pushed quality content and social media impact of your blog posts to the forefront of every bloggers’ SEO strategy.